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Researchers Say Human Lifespans Have Already Hit Their Peak (newsweek.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek:
We have reached our peak in terms of lifespan, athletic performance and height, according to a new survey of research and historical records... "These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress," said Jean-FranÃois Toussaint, a physiologist at Paris Descartes University, France, in a press release... For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, a team of French scientists, including Toussaint, from a range of fields analyzed 120 years' worth of historical records and previous research to gauge the varying pace of changes seen in human athletic performance, human lifespan and human height. While, as they observe, the 20th century saw a surge in improvements in all three areas that mirrored industrial, medical and scientific advances, the pace of those advances has slowed significantly in recent years.
The team looked at world records in a variety of sports, including running, swimming, skating, cycling and weight-lifting. Olympic athletes in those sports continually toppled records by impressive margins from the early 1900s to the end of the 20th century, according the study. But since then, Olympic records have shown just incremental improvements. We have stopped not only getting faster and stronger, according to the study, but also growing taller... [D]ata from the last three decades suggest that heights have plateaued among high-income countries in North America and Europe... As for our human lifespan, life expectancy in high-income countries rose by about 30 years from 1900 to 2000, according to a National Institutes of Health study cited by the authors, thanks to better nutrition, hygiene, vaccines and other medical improvements. But we may have maxed out our biological limit for longevity. The researchers found that in many human populations, says Toussaint, "it's more and more difficult to show progress in lifespan despite the advances of science."
The team looked at world records in a variety of sports, including running, swimming, skating, cycling and weight-lifting. Olympic athletes in those sports continually toppled records by impressive margins from the early 1900s to the end of the 20th century, according the study. But since then, Olympic records have shown just incremental improvements. We have stopped not only getting faster and stronger, according to the study, but also growing taller... [D]ata from the last three decades suggest that heights have plateaued among high-income countries in North America and Europe... As for our human lifespan, life expectancy in high-income countries rose by about 30 years from 1900 to 2000, according to a National Institutes of Health study cited by the authors, thanks to better nutrition, hygiene, vaccines and other medical improvements. But we may have maxed out our biological limit for longevity. The researchers found that in many human populations, says Toussaint, "it's more and more difficult to show progress in lifespan despite the advances of science."
A new kidney would have saved him. We need a plan to grow new organs, even if it's in pigs or in brainless human bodies. Of course the Christian fundamentalists will never let this happen.
The fundies object to embryonic research. Kidneys and other organs are grown from somatic cells, ideally taken from the recipient.
A more immediate solution would be a free market in organs, which would increase the donor pool. Ignorant people object, by claiming that selling organs would lead to abuses, without realizing that the hospitals already buy and sell organs. It is only illegal for the donor to receive a portion of the money. So the money incentivizes everyone but the person capable of increasing the supply.
Fucking hypocrites.
You may disagree with them (as do I), but what about their behavior is hypocritical?
"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."
Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?
It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.
When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.
If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.
For any sport there's an optimal physique, and outside of fundamentally changing human biology you can't really do much better.
For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.
Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.
I stole this Sig
There are unexplored paths, such as research into human performance enhancement. These are blocked by the anti-doping organizations that plague athletic organizations. Some competitions should be open to deliberate enhancement.
Bruce Perens.
Kjella opined:
We've gotten *very* good at dealing with sick people. But we haven't really made any big progress on making healthy people healthier by slowing the effect of aging. Being in "good health" means entirely different things for a 20yo and an 80yo. I think it's because it's very ethically challenging to experiment on healthy people, like if you got cancer obviously we'll treat that. But if you're "only" getting older, do we really dare mess that up? I'd say the answer is overwhelmingly no, unless there's nothing wrong with you we'll do nothing. Okay eat healthy, exercise but nothing to truly stall the decline.
Actually, almost all of the gains in average human lifespan in the 20th century are directly attributable to antibiotics and widespread vaccination against (mostly) childhood diseases.
Maximum human lifespan has changed little, if at all, since the dawn of recorded history. What changed dramatically in the prior century was average lifespan, which is a very different thing. Prior to the wide availability of penicillin in the mid-1940's, a staggering number of humans died from infections that became easily treatable afterward. As more antibiotics - and especially antibiotics that were effective against infections for which penicillin was useless - were introduced, mortality from infection essentially came to a halt in the developed world.
The advent of immunizations for diseases other than smallpox likewise had an enormous impact on morbidity rates from endemic and epidemic diseases that had theretofore taken a staggering toll among infants and children, such as polio, whooping cough, measles, rubella, and mumps. One of the principal reasons families in the pre-immunization era tended to be large was that approximately 50% of children died before they reached adulthood, and the death of a young child was a commonplace tragedy that most families experienced at least once.
Largely halting those deaths - and the equally common deaths of women from "puerperal fever" as a result of infections acquired during childbirth - accounts for virtually all of the apparent increase in human lifespan in the past century or so. As the number of women who survived childbirth, and their children who survived childhood diseases that were ubiquitous prior to widespread, mandatory immunization as a public health measure rose almost logarythmically, the average age of death also increased, as a direct result of their survival.
The truly frightening thing to me is the prospect that the antibiotics upon which so much of this apparent increase in human lifespan depends are rapidly losing their effectiveness due to overuse. (And, while general practictioners who allow their patients to browbeat them into prescribing antibiotics for viral infections such as colds and flus - against which they are completely ineffective - are major contributors to the trend, the most responsible culprits are livestock growers who use them in incredible quantities, not to treat diseases in their food animals, but as preventatives, which they add to their fodder every freakin' day.) Combine that with the profoundly anti-scientific "anti-vax" movement among parents in the USA, and you have a prescription for a planet-wide return to the same death rates that were the rule for all human populations prior to the 20th century.
If you doubt that; if you consider the threat ludicrously overstated, consider this: penicillin - the miracle drug that began the antibiotic revolution - is no longer prescribed by doctors. That's not because there are "newer and better options available." It's because it no longer works. So many bacteria have evolved strong resistance to penicillin that it has become almost entirely ineffective. And it's not the only one that has lost its power.
It's just the first one ...
Check out my novel.